Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny
THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES
By Honore De Balzac
Translated by Ellen Marriage
PREPARER’S NOTE: The Girl with the Golden Eyes is the third part of a
trilogy. Part one is entitled Ferragus and part two is The Duchesse de
Langeais. The three stories are frequently combined under the title The
Thirteen.
DEDICATION
To Eugene Delacroix, Painter.
THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES
One of those sights in which most horror is to be encountered is,
surely, the general aspect of the Parisian populace--a people fearful
to behold, gaunt, yellow, tawny. Is not Paris a vast field in perpetual
turmoil from a storm of interests beneath which are whirled along a crop
of human beings, who are, more often than not, reaped by death, only to
be born again as pinched as ever, men whose twisted and contorted faces
give out at every pore the instinct, the desire, the poisons with
which their brains are pregnant; not faces so much as masks; masks of
weakness, masks of strength, masks of misery, masks of joy, masks of
hypocrisy; all alike worn and stamped with the indelible signs of
a panting cupidity? What is it they want? Gold or pleasure? A few
observations upon the soul of Paris may explain the causes of its
cadaverous physiognomy, which has but two ages--youth and decay: youth,
wan and colorless; decay, painted to seem young. In looking at
this excavated people, foreigners, who are not prone to reflection,
experience at first a movement of disgust towards the capital, that
vast workshop of delights, from which, in a short time, they cannot even
extricate themselves, and where they stay willingly to be corrupted. A
few words will suffice to justify physiologically the almost infernal
hue of Parisian faces, for it is not in mere sport that Paris has been
called a hell. Take the phrase for truth. There all is smoke and fire,
everything gleams, crackles, flames, evaporates, dies out, then lights
up again, with shooting sparks, and is consumed. In no other country has
life ever been more ardent or acute. The social nature, even in fusion,
seems to say after each completed work: “Pass on to another!” just as
Nature says herself. Like Nature herself, this social nature is busied
with insects and flowers of a day--ephemeral trifles; and so, too,
it throws up fire and flame from its eternal crater. Perhaps, before
analyzing the causes which lend a special physiognomy to each tribe of
this intelligent and mobile nation, the general cause should be pointed
out which bleaches and discolors, tints with blue or brown individuals
in more or less degree.
By dint of taking interest in everything, the Parisian ends by being
interested in nothing. No emotion dominating his face, which friction
has rubbed away, it turns gray like the faces of those houses upon which
all kinds of dust and smoke have blown. In effect, the Parisian, with
his indifference on the day for what the morrow will bring forth,
lives like a child, whatever may be his age. He grumbles at everything,
consoles himself for everything, jests at everything, forgets,
desires, and tastes everything, seizes all with passion, quits all with
indifference--his kings, his conquests, his glory, his idols of bronze
or glass--as he throws away his stockings, his hats, and his fortune. In
Paris no sentiment can withstand the drift of things, and their current
compels a struggle in which the passions are relaxed: there love is
a desire, and hatred a whim; there’s no true kinsman but the
thousand-franc note, no better friend than the pawnbroker. This
universal toleration bears its fruits, and in the salon, as in the
street, there is no one _de trop_, there is no one absolutely useful,
or absolutely harmful--knaves or fools, men of wit or integrity. There
everything is tolerated: the government and the guillotine, religion and
the cholera. You are always acceptable to this world, you will never
be missed by it. What, then, is the dominating impulse in this country
without morals, without faith, without any sentiment, wherein, however,
every sentiment, belief, and moral has its origin and end? It is gold
and pleasure. Take those two words for a lantern, and explore that great
stucco cage, that hive with its black gutters, and follow the windings
of that thought which agitates, sustains, and occupies it! Consider!
And, in the first place, examine the world which possesses nothing.
The artisan, the man of the proletariat, who uses his hands, his tongue,
his back, his right arm, his five fingers, to live--well, this very man,
who should be the first to economize his vital principle, outruns his
strength, yokes his wife to some machine, wears out his child, and ties
him to the wheel. The manufacturer--or I know not what secondary thread
which sets in motion all these folk who with their foul hands mould
and gild porcelain, sew coats and dresses, beat out iron, turn wood and
steel, weave hemp, festoon crystal, imitate flowers, work woolen things,
break in horses, dress harness, carve in copper, paint carriages, blow
glass, corrode the diamond, polish metals, turn marble into leaves,
labor on pebbles, deck out thought, tinge, bleach, or blacken
everything--well, this middleman has come to that world of sweat and
good-will, of study and patience, with promises of lavish wages, either
in the name of the town’s caprices or with the voice of the monster
dubbed speculation. Thus, these _quadrumanes_ set themselves to watch,
work, and suffer, to fast, sweat, and bestir them. Then, careless of the
future, greedy of pleasure, counting on their right arm as the painter
on his palette, lords for one day, they throw their money on Mondays
to the _cabarets_ which gird the town like a belt of mud, haunts of the
most shameless of the daughters of Venus, in which the periodical money
of this people, as ferocious in their pleasures as they are calm at
work, is squandered as it had been at play. For five days, then, there
is no repose for this laborious portion of Paris! It is given up to
actions which make it warped and rough, lean and pale, gush forth with a
thousand fits of creative energy. And then its pleasure, its repose,
are an exhausting debauch, swarthy and black with blows, white with
intoxication, or yellow with indigestion. It lasts but two days, but it
steals to-morrow’s bread, the week’s soup, the wife’s dress, the child’s
wretched rags. Men, born doubtless to be beautiful--for all creatures
have a relative beauty--are enrolled from their childhood beneath the
yoke of force, beneath the rule of the hammer, the chisel, the loom, and
have been promptly vulcanized. Is not Vulcan, with his hideousness and
his strength, the emblem of this strong and hideous nation--sublime
in its mechanical intelligence, patient in its season, and once in a
century terrible, inflammable as gunpowder, and ripe with brandy for
the madness of revolution, with wits enough, in fine, to take fire at
a captious word, which signifies to it always: Gold and Pleasure! If
we comprise in it all those who hold out their hands for an alms, for
lawful wages, or the five francs that are granted to every kind of
Parisian prostitution, in short, for all the money well or ill earned,
this people numbers three hundred thousand individuals. Were it not for
the _cabarets_, would not the Government be overturned every Tuesday?
Happily, by Tuesday, this people is glutted, sleeps off its pleasure, is
penniless, and returns to its labor, to dry bread, stimulated by a need
of material procreation, which has become a habit to it. None the
less, this people has its phenomenal virtues, its complete men, unknown
Napoleons, who are the type of its strength carried to its highest
expression, and sum up its social capacity in an existence wherein
thought and movement combine less to bring joy into it than to
neutralize the action of sorrow.
Chance has made an artisan economical, chance has favored him with
forethought, he has been able to look forward, has met with a wife and
found himself a father, and, after some years of hard privation, he
embarks in some little draper’s business, hires a shop. If neither
sickness nor vice blocks his way--if he has prospered--there is the
sketch of this normal life.
And, in the first place, hail to that king of Parisian activity, to whom
time and space give way. Yes, hail to that being, composed of saltpetre
and gas, who makes children for France during his laborious nights,
and in the day multiplies his personality for the service, glory,
and pleasure of his fellow-citizens. This man solves the problem
of sufficing at once to his amiable wife, to his hearth, to the
_Constitutionnel_, to his office, to the National Guard, to the opera,
and to God; but, only in order that the _Constitutionnel_, his office,
the National Guard, the opera, his wife, and God may be changed into
coin. In fine, hail to an irreproachable pluralist. Up every day at five
o’clock, he traverses like a bird the space which separates his dwelling
from the Rue Montmartre. Let it blow or thunder, rain or snow, he is at
the _Constitutionnel_, and waits there for the load of newspapers which
he has undertaken to distribute. He receives this political bread with
eagerness, takes it, bears it away. At nine o’clock he is in the bosom
of his family, flings a jest to his wife, snatches a loud kiss from her,
gulps down a cup of coffee, or scolds his children. At a quarter to ten
he puts in an appearance at the _Mairie_. There, stuck upon a stool,
like a parrot on its perch, warmed by Paris town, he registers until
four o’clock, with never a tear or a smile, the deaths and births of an
entire district. The sorrow, the happiness, of the parish flow beneath
his pen--as the essence of the _Constitutionnel_ traveled before upon
his shoulders. Nothing weighs upon him! He goes always straight before
him, takes his patriotism ready made from the newspaper, contradicts no
one, shouts or applauds with the world, and lives like a bird. Two yards
from his parish, in the event of an important ceremony, he can yield
his place to an assistant, and betake himself to chant a requiem from
a stall in the church of which on Sundays he is the fairest ornament,
where his is the most imposing voice, where he distorts his huge mouth
with energy to thunder out a joyous _Amen_. So is he chorister. At four
o’clock, freed from his official servitude, he reappears to shed joy and
gaiety upon the most famous shop in the city. Happy is his wife, he has
no time to be jealous: he is a man of action rather than of sentiment.
His mere arrival spurs the young ladies at the counter; their bright
eyes storm the customers; he expands in the midst of all the finery, the
lace and muslin kerchiefs, that their cunning hands have wrought. Or,
again, more often still, before his dinner he waits on a client, copies
the page of a newspaper, or carries to the doorkeeper some goods that
have been delayed. Every other day, at six, he is faithful to his
post. A permanent bass for the chorus, he betakes himself to the opera,
prepared to become a soldier or an arab, prisoner, savage, peasant,
spirit, camel’s leg or lion, a devil or a genie, a slave or a
eunuch, black or white; always ready to feign joy or sorrow, pity or
astonishment, to utter cries that never vary, to hold his tongue, to
hunt, or fight for Rome or Egypt, but always at heart--a huckster still.
At midnight he returns--a man, the good husband, the tender father;
he slips into the conjugal bed, his imagination still afire with the
illusive forms of the operatic nymphs, and so turns to the profit
of conjugal love the world’s depravities, the voluptuous curves of
Taglioni’s leg. And finally, if he sleeps, he sleeps apace, and hurries
through his slumber as he does his life.
This man sums up all things--history, literature, politics, government,
religion, military science. Is he not a living encyclopaedia, a
grotesque Atlas; ceaselessly in motion, like Paris itself, and knowing
not repose? He is all legs. No physiognomy could preserve its purity
amid such toils. Perhaps the artisan who dies at thirty, an old man, his
stomach tanned by repeated doses of brandy, will be held, according to
certain leisured philosophers, to be happier than the huckster is.
The one perishes in a breath, and the other by degrees. From his eight
industries, from the labor of his shoulders, his throat, his hands,
from his wife and his business, the one derives--as from so many
farms--children, some thousands of francs, and the most laborious
happiness that has ever diverted the heart of man. This fortune and
these children, or the children who sum up everything for him, become
the prey of the world above, to which he brings his ducats and his
daughter or his son, reared at college, who, with more education than
his father, raises higher his ambitious gaze. Often the son of a retail
tradesman would fain be something in the State.
Ambition of that sort carries on our thought to the second Parisian
sphere. Go up one story, then, and descend to the _entresol_: or climb
down from the attic and remain on the fourth floor; in fine, penetrate
into the world which has possessions: the same result! Wholesale
merchants, and their men--people with small banking accounts and much
integrity--rogues and catspaws, clerks old and young, sheriffs’ clerks,
barristers’ clerks, solicitors’ clerks; in fine, all the working,
thinking, and speculating members of that lower middle class which
honeycombs the interests of Paris and watches over its granary,
accumulates the coin, stores the products that the proletariat have
made, preserves the fruits of the South, the fishes, the wine from every
sun-favored hill; which stretches its hands over the Orient, and takes
from it the shawls that the Russ and the Turk despise; which harvests
even from the Indies; crouches down in expectation of a sale, greedy
of profit; which discounts bills, turns over and collects all kinds of
securities, holds all Paris in its hand, watches over the fantasies
of children, spies out the caprices and the vices of mature age,
sucks money out of disease. Even so, if they drink no brandy, like the
artisan, nor wallow in the mire of debauch, all equally abuse their
strength, immeasurably strain their bodies and their minds alike, are
burned away with desires, devastated with the swiftness of the pace. In
their case the physical distortion is accomplished beneath the whip of
interests, beneath the scourge of ambitions which torture the educated
portion of this monstrous city, just as in the case of the proletariat
it is brought about by the cruel see-saw of the material elaborations
perpetually required from the despotism of the aristocratic “_I will_.”
Here, too, then, in order to obey that universal master, pleasure or
gold, they must devour time, hasten time, find more than four-and-twenty
hours in the day and night, waste themselves, slay themselves, and
purchase two years of unhealthy repose with thirty years of old age.
Only, the working-man dies in hospital when the last term of his stunted
growth expires; whereas the man of the middle class is set upon living,
and lives on, but in a state of idiocy. You will meet him, with his
worn, flat old face, with no light in his eyes, with no strength in his
limbs, dragging himself with a dazed air along the boulevard--the belt
of his Venus, of his beloved city. What was his want? The sabre of the
National Guard, a permanent stock-pot, a decent plot in Pere Lachaise,
and, for his old age, a little gold honestly earned. _HIS_ Monday is on
Sunday, his rest a drive in a hired carriage--a country excursion during
which his wife and children glut themselves merrily with dust or bask
in the sun; his dissipation is at the restaurateur’s, whose poisonous
dinner has won renown, or at some family ball, where he suffocates till
midnight. Some fools are surprised at the phantasmagoria of the monads
which they see with the aid of the microscope in a drop of water;
but what would Rabelais’ Gargantua,--that misunderstood figure of
an audacity so sublime,--what would that giant say, fallen from the
celestial spheres, if he amused himself by contemplating the motions of
this secondary life of Paris, of which here is one of the formulae? Have
you seen one of those little constructions--cold in summer, and with
no other warmth than a small stove in winter--placed beneath the vast
copper dome which crowns the Halle-auble? Madame is there by morning.
She is engaged at the markets, and makes by this occupation twelve
thousand francs a year, people say. Monsieur, when Madame is up, passes
into a gloomy office, where he lends money till the week-end to the
tradesmen of his district. By nine o’clock he is at the passport office,
of which he is one of the minor officials. By evening he is at the
box-office of the Theatre Italien, or of any other theatre you like. The
children are put out to nurse, and only return to be sent to college or
to boarding-school. Monsieur and Madame live on the third floor, have
but one cook, give dances in a salon twelve foot by eight, lit by
argand lamps; but they give a hundred and fifty thousand francs to their
daughter, and retire at the age of fifty, an age when they begin to show
themselves on the balcony of the opera, in a _fiacre_ at Longchamps; or,
on sunny days, in faded clothes on the boulevards--the fruit of all this
sowing. Respected by their neighbors, in good odor with the government,
connected with the upper middle classes, Monsieur obtains at sixty-five
the Cross of the Legion of Honor, and his daughter’s father-in-law, a
parochial mayor, invites him to his evenings. These life-long labors,
then, are for the good of the children, whom these lower middle classes
are inevitably driven to exalt. Thus each sphere directs all its efforts
towards the sphere above it. The son of the rich grocer becomes a
notary, the son of the timber merchant becomes a magistrate. No link
is wanting in the chain, and everything stimulates the upward march of
money.
Thus we are brought to the third circle of this hell, which, perhaps,
will some day find its Dante. In this third social circle, a sort of
Parisian belly, in which the interests of the town are digested, and
where they are condensed into the form known as _business_, there moves
and agitates, as by some acrid and bitter intestinal process, the crowd
of lawyers, doctors, notaries, councillors, business men, bankers, big
merchants, speculators, and magistrates. Here are to be found even
more causes of moral and physical destruction than elsewhere. These
people--almost all of them--live in unhealthy offices, in fetid
ante-chambers, in little barred dens, and spend their days bowed down
beneath the weight of affairs; they rise at dawn to be in time, not to
be left behind, to gain all or not to lose, to overreach a man or his
money, to open or wind up some business, to take advantage of some
fleeting opportunity, to get a man hanged or set him free. They infect
their horses, they overdrive and age and break them, like their own
legs, before their time. Time is their tyrant: it fails them, it escapes
them; they can neither expand it nor cut it short. What soul can remain
great, pure, moral, and generous, and, consequently, what face retain
its beauty in this depraving practice of a calling which compels one to
bear the weight of the public sorrows, to analyze them, to weigh them,
estimate them, and mark them out by rule? Where do these folk put aside
their hearts?... I do not know; but they leave them somewhere or other,
when they have any, before they descend each morning into the abyss of
the misery which puts families on the rack. For them there is no such
thing as mystery; they see the reverse side of society, whose confessors
they are, and despise it. Then, whatever they do, owing to their contact
with corruption, they either are horrified at it and grow gloomy, or
else, out of lassitude, or some secret compromise, espouse it. In fine,
they necessarily become callous to every sentiment, since man, his laws
and his institutions, make them steal, like jackals, from corpses that
are still warm. At all hours the financier is trampling on the living,
the attorney on the dead, the pleader on the conscience. Forced to be
speaking without a rest, they all substitute words for ideas, phrases
for feelings, and their soul becomes a larynx. Neither the great
merchant, nor the judge, nor the pleader preserves his sense of right;
they feel no more, they apply set rules that leave cases out of count.
Borne along by their headlong course, they are neither husbands nor
fathers nor lovers; they glide on sledges over the facts of life, and
live at all times at the high pressure conduced by business and the vast
city. When they return to their homes they are required to go to a ball,
to the opera, into society, where they can make clients, acquaintances,
protectors. They all eat to excess, play and keep vigil, and their faces
become bloated, flushed, and emaciated.
To this terrific expenditure of intellectual strength, to such multifold
moral contradictions, they oppose--not, indeed pleasure, it would be too
pale a contrast--but debauchery, a debauchery both secret and alarming,
for they have all means at their disposal, and fix the morality of
society. Their genuine stupidity lies hid beneath their specialism. They
know their business, but are ignorant of everything which is outside
it. So that to preserve their self-conceit they question everything, are
crudely and crookedly critical. They appear to be sceptics and are in
reality simpletons; they swamp their wits in interminable arguments.
Almost all conveniently adopt social, literary, or political prejudices,
to do away with the need of having opinions, just as they adapt their
conscience to the standard of the Code or the Tribunal of Commerce.
Having started early to become men of note, they turn into mediocrities,
and crawl over the high places of the world. So, too, their faces
present the harsh pallor, the deceitful coloring, those dull, tarnished
eyes, and garrulous, sensual mouths, in which the observer recognizes
the symptoms of the degeneracy of the thought and its rotation in the
circle of a special idea which destroys the creative faculties of the
brain and the gift of seeing in large, of generalizing and deducing. No
man who has allowed himself to be caught in the revolutions of the gear
of these huge machines can ever become great. If he is a doctor, either
he has practised little or he is an exception--a Bichat who dies young.
If a great merchant, something remains--he is almost Jacques Coeur. Did
Robespierre practise? Danton was an idler who waited. But who, moreover
has ever felt envious of the figures of Danton and Robespierre, however
lofty they were? These men of affairs, _par excellence_, attract money
to them, and hoard it in order to ally themselves with aristocratic
families. If the ambition of the working-man is that of the small
tradesman, here, too, are the same passions. The type of this class
might be either an ambitious bourgeois, who, after a life of privation
and continual scheming, passes into the Council of State as an ant
passes through a chink; or some newspaper editor, jaded with intrigue,
whom the king makes a peer of France--perhaps to revenge himself on the
nobility; or some notary become mayor of his parish: all people crushed
with business, who, if they attain their end, are literally _killed_ in
its attainment. In France the usage is to glorify wigs. Napoleon, Louis
XVI., the great rulers, alone have always wished for young men to fulfil
their projects.
Above this sphere the artist world exists. But here, too, the faces
stamped with the seal of originality are worn, nobly indeed, but worn,
fatigued, nervous. Harassed by a need of production, outrun by their
costly fantasies, worn out by devouring genius, hungry for pleasure, the
artists of Paris would all regain by excessive labor what they have lost
by idleness, and vainly seek to reconcile the world and glory, money
and art. To begin with, the artist is ceaselessly panting under his
creditors; his necessities beget his debts, and his debts require of
him his nights. After his labor, his pleasure. The comedian plays till
midnight, studies in the morning, rehearses at noon; the sculptor is
bent before his statue; the journalist is a marching thought, like the
soldier when at war; the painter who is the fashion is crushed with
work, the painter with no occupation, if he feels himself to be a man of
genius, gnaws his entrails. Competition, rivalry, calumny assail talent.
Some, in desperation, plunge into the abyss of vice, others die young
and unknown because they have discounted their future too soon. Few of
these figures, originally sublime, remain beautiful. On the other hand,
the flagrant beauty of their heads is not understood. An artist’s face
is always exorbitant, it is always above or below the conventional lines
of what fools call the _beau-ideal_. What power is it that destroys
them? Passion. Every passion in Paris resolves into two terms: gold and
pleasure. Now, do you not breathe again? Do you not feel air and space
purified? Here is neither labor nor suffering. The soaring arch of
gold has reached the summit. From the lowest gutters, where its
stream commences, from the little shops where it is stopped by puny
coffer-dams, from the heart of the counting-houses and great workshops,
where its volume is that of ingots--gold, in the shape of dowries and
inheritances, guided by the hands of young girls or the bony fingers of
age, courses towards the aristocracy, where it will become a blazing,
expansive stream. But, before leaving the four territories upon which
the utmost wealth of Paris is based, it is fitting, having cited the
moral causes, to deduce those which are physical, and to call attention
to a pestilence, latent, as it were, which incessantly acts upon the
faces of the porter, the artisan, the small shopkeeper; to point out
a deleterious influence the corruption of which equals that of the
Parisian administrators who allow it so complacently to exist!
If the air of the houses in which the greater proportion of the middle
classes live is noxious, if the atmosphere of the streets belches out
cruel miasmas into stuffy back-kitchens where there is little air,
realize that, apart from this pestilence, the forty thousand houses of
this great city have their foundations in filth, which the powers that
be have not yet seriously attempted to enclose with mortar walls solid
enough to prevent even the most fetid mud from filtering through the
soil, poisoning the wells, and maintaining subterraneously to Lutetia
the tradition of her celebrated name. Half of Paris sleeps amidst the
putrid exhalations of courts and streets and sewers. But let us turn
to the vast saloons, gilded and airy; the hotels in their gardens,
the rich, indolent, happy moneyed world. There the faces are lined and
scarred with vanity. There nothing is real. To seek for pleasure is it
not to find _ennui_? People in society have at an early age warped their
nature. Having no occupation other than to wallow in pleasure, they
have speedily misused their sense, as the artisan has misused brandy.
Pleasure is of the nature of certain medical substances: in order to
obtain constantly the same effects the doses must be doubled, and death
or degradation is contained in the last. All the lower classes are on
their knees before the wealthy, and watch their tastes in order to turn
them into vices and exploit them. Thus you see in these folk at an early
age tastes instead of passions, romantic fantasies and lukewarm loves.
There impotence reigns; there ideas have ceased--they have evaporated
together with energy amongst the affectations of the boudoir and the
cajolements of women. There are fledglings of forty, old doctors
of sixty years. The wealthy obtain in Paris ready-made wit and
science--formulated opinions which save them the need of having wit,
science, or opinion of their own. The irrationality of this world is
equaled by its weakness and its licentiousness. It is greedy of time
to the point of wasting it. Seek in it for affection as little as
for ideas. Its kisses conceal a profound indifference, its urbanity
a perpetual contempt. It has no other fashion of love. Flashes of wit
without profundity, a wealth of indiscretion, scandal, and above all,
commonplace. Such is the sum of its speech; but these happy fortunates
pretend that they do not meet to make and repeat maxims in the manner of
La Rochefoucauld as though there did not exist a mean, invented by the
eighteenth century, between a superfluity and absolute blank. If a few
men of character indulge in witticism, at once subtle and refined, they
are misunderstood; soon, tired of giving without receiving, they remain
at home, and leave fools to reign over their territory. This hollow
life, this perpetual expectation of a pleasure which never comes, this
permanent _ennui_ and emptiness of soul, heart, and mind, the lassitude
of the upper Parisian world, is reproduced on its features, and stamps
its parchment faces, its premature wrinkles, that physiognomy of the
wealthy upon which impotence has set its grimace, in which gold is
mirrored, and whence intelligence has fled.
Such a view of moral Paris proves that physical Paris could not be other
than it is. This coroneted town is like a queen, who, being always
with child, has desires of irresistible fury. Paris is the crown of the
world, a brain which perishes of genius and leads human civilization;
it is a great man, a perpetually creative artist, a politician with
second-sight who must of necessity have wrinkles on his forehead, the
vices of a great man, the fantasies of the artist, and the politician’s
disillusions. Its physiognomy suggests the evolution of good and evil,
battle and victory; the moral combat of ‘89, the clarion calls of which
still re-echo in every corner of the world; and also the downfall of
1814. Thus this city can no more be moral, or cordial, or clean, than
the engines which impel those proud leviathans which you admire
when they cleave the waves! Is not Paris a sublime vessel laden with
intelligence? Yes, her arms are one of those oracles which fatality
sometimes allows. The _City of Paris_ has her great mast, all of bronze,
carved with victories, and for watchman--Napoleon. The barque may roll
and pitch, but she cleaves the world, illuminates it through the hundred
mouths of her tribunes, ploughs the seas of science, rides with
full sail, cries from the height of her tops, with the voice of her
scientists and artists: “Onward, advance! Follow me!” She carries a
huge crew, which delights in adorning her with fresh streamers. Boys
and urchins laughing in the rigging; ballast of heavy _bourgeoisie_;
working-men and sailor-men touched with tar; in her cabins the lucky
passengers; elegant midshipmen smoke their cigars leaning over the
bulwarks; then, on the deck, her soldiers, innovators or ambitious,
would accost every fresh shore, and shooting out their bright lights
upon it, ask for glory which is pleasure, or for love which needs gold.
Thus the exorbitant movement of the proletariat, the corrupting
influence of the interests which consume the two middle classes, the
cruelties of the artist’s thought, and the excessive pleasure which is
sought for incessantly by the great, explain the normal ugliness of
the Parisian physiognomy. It is only in the Orient that the human race
presents a magnificent figure, but that is an effect of the constant
calm affected by those profound philosophers with their long pipes,
their short legs, their square contour, who despise and hold activity
in horror, whilst in Paris the little and the great and the mediocre run
and leap and drive, whipped on by an inexorable goddess, Necessity--the
necessity for money, glory, and amusement. Thus, any face which is fresh
and graceful and reposeful, any really young face, is in Paris the most
extraordinary of exceptions; it is met with rarely. Should you see one
there, be sure it belongs either to a young and ardent ecclesiastic or
to some good abbe of forty with three chins; to a young girl of pure
life such as is brought up in certain middle-class families; to a mother
of twenty, still full of illusions, as she suckles her first-born; to a
young man newly embarked from the provinces, and intrusted to the care
of some devout dowager who keeps him without a sou; or, perhaps, to some
shop assistant who goes to bed at midnight wearied out with folding
and unfolding calico, and rises at seven o’clock to arrange the window;
often again to some man of science or poetry, who lives monastically in
the embrace of a fine idea, who remains sober, patient, and chaste;
else to some self-contented fool, feeding himself on folly, reeking of
health, in a perpetual state of absorption with his own smile; or to the
soft and happy race of loungers, the only folk really happy in Paris,
which unfolds for them hour by hour its moving poetry.
Nevertheless, there is in Paris a proportion of privileged beings to
whom this excessive movement of industries, interests, affairs, arts,
and gold is profitable. These beings are women. Although they also have
a thousand secret causes which, here more than elsewhere, destroy their
physiognomy, there are to be found in the feminine world little happy
colonies, who live in Oriental fashion and can preserve their beauty;
but these women rarely show themselves on foot in the streets, they lie
hid like rare plants who only unfold their petals at certain hours, and
constitute veritable exotic exceptions. However, Paris is essentially
the country of contrasts. If true sentiments are rare there, there also
are to be found, as elsewhere, noble friendships and unlimited devotion.
On this battlefield of interests and passions, just as in the midst
of those marching societies where egoism triumphs, where every one
is obliged to defend himself, and which we call _armies_, it seems as
though sentiments liked to be complete when they showed themselves,
and are sublime by juxtaposition. So it is with faces. In Paris one
sometimes sees in the aristocracy, set like stars, the ravishing faces
of young people, the fruit of quite exceptional manners and education.
To the youthful beauty of the English stock they unite the firmness
of Southern traits. The fire of their eyes, a delicious bloom on their
lips, the lustrous black of their soft locks, a white complexion, a
distinguished caste of features, render them the flowers of the human
race, magnificent to behold against the mass of other faces, worn, old,
wrinkled, and grimacing. So women, too, admire such young people with
that eager pleasure which men take in watching a pretty girl, elegant,
gracious, and embellished with all the virginal charms with which our
imagination pleases to adorn the perfect woman. If this hurried glance
at the population of Paris has enabled us to conceive the rarity of a
Raphaelesque face, and the passionate admiration which such an one must
inspire at the first sight, the prime interest of our history will have
been justified. _Quod erat demonstrandum_--if one may be permitted to
apply scholastic formulae to the science of manners.
Upon one of those fine spring mornings, when the leaves, although
unfolded, are not yet green, when the sun begins to gild the roofs, and
the sky is blue, when the population of Paris issues from its cells to
swarm along the boulevards, glides like a serpent of a thousand coils
through the Rue de la Paix towards the Tuileries, saluting the hymeneal
magnificence which the country puts on; on one of these joyous days,
then, a young man as beautiful as the day itself, dressed with taste,
easy of manner--to let out the secret he was a love-child, the natural
son of Lord Dudley and the famous Marquise de Vordac--was walking in the
great avenue of the Tuileries. This Adonis, by name Henri de Marsay,
was born in France, when Lord Dudley had just married the young lady,
already Henri’s mother, to an old gentleman called M. de Marsay. This
faded and almost extinguished butterfly recognized the child as his own
in consideration of the life interest in a fund of a hundred thousand
francs definitively assigned to his putative son; a generosity which
did not cost Lord Dudley too dear. French funds were worth at that time
seventeen francs, fifty centimes. The old gentleman died without having
ever known his wife. Madame de Marsay subsequently married the Marquis
de Vordac, but before becoming a marquise she showed very little anxiety
as to her son and Lord Dudley. To begin with, the declaration of war
between France and England had separated the two lovers, and fidelity
at all costs was not, and never will be, the fashion of Paris. Then the
successes of the woman, elegant, pretty, universally adored, crushed in
the Parisienne the maternal sentiment. Lord Dudley was no more troubled
about his offspring than was the mother,--the speedy infidelity of a
young girl he had ardently loved gave him, perhaps, a sort of aversion
for all that issued from her. Moreover, fathers can, perhaps, only love
the children with whom they are fully acquainted, a social belief of the
utmost importance for the peace of families, which should be held by all
the celibate, proving as it does that paternity is a sentiment nourished
artificially by woman, custom, and the law.
Poor Henri de Marsay knew no other father than that one of the two who
was not compelled to be one. The paternity of M. de Marsay was naturally
most incomplete. In the natural order, it is but for a few fleeting
instants that children have a father, and M. de Marsay imitated nature.
The worthy man would not have sold his name had he been free from
vices. Thus he squandered without remorse in gambling hells, and drank
elsewhere, the few dividends which the National Treasury paid to
its bondholders. Then he handed over the child to an aged sister, a
Demoiselle de Marsay, who took much care of him, and provided him, out
of the meagre sum allowed by her brother, with a tutor, an abbe without
a farthing, who took the measure of the youth’s future, and determined
to pay himself out of the hundred thousand livres for the care given to
his pupil, for whom he conceived an affection. As chance had it, this
tutor was a true priest, one of those ecclesiastics cut out to become
cardinals in France, or Borgias beneath the tiara. He taught the child
in three years what he might have learned at college in ten. Then the
great man, by name the Abbe de Maronis, completed the education of
his pupil by making him study civilization under all its aspects: he
nourished him on his experience, led him little into churches, which
at that time were closed; introduced him sometimes behind the scenes of
theatres, more often into the houses of courtesans; he exhibited human
emotions to him one by one; taught him politics in the drawing-rooms,
where they simmered at the time, explained to him the machinery of
government, and endeavored out of attraction towards a fine nature,
deserted, yet rich in promise, virilely to replace a mother: is not the
Church the mother of orphans? The pupil was responsive to so much care.
The worthy priest died in 1812, a bishop, with the satisfaction of
having left in this world a child whose heart and mind were so well
moulded that he could outwit a man of forty. Who would have expected to
have found a heart of bronze, a brain of steel, beneath external traits
as seductive as ever the old painters, those naive artists, had given to
the serpent in the terrestrial paradise? Nor was that all. In addition,
the good-natured prelate had procured for the child of his choice
certain acquaintances in the best Parisian society, which might equal
in value, in the young man’s hand, another hundred thousand invested
livres. In fine, this priest, vicious but politic, sceptical yet
learned, treacherous yet amiable, weak in appearance yet as vigorous
physically as intellectually, was so genuinely useful to his pupil, so
complacent to his vices, so fine a calculator of all kinds of strength,
so profound when it was needful to make some human reckoning, so
youthful at table, at Frascati, at--I know not where, that the grateful
Henri de Marsay was hardly moved at aught in 1814, except when he looked
at the portrait of his beloved bishop, the only personal possession
which the prelate had been able to bequeath him (admirable type of
the men whose genius will preserve the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman
Church, compromised for the moment by the feebleness of its recruits and
the decrepit age of its pontiffs; but if the church likes!).
The continental war prevented young De Marsay from knowing his real
father. It is doubtful whether he was aware of his name. A deserted
child, he was equally ignorant of Madame de Marsay. Naturally, he had
little regret for his putative father. As for Mademoiselle de Marsay,
his only mother, he built for her a handsome little monument in Pere
Lachaise when she died. Monseigneur de Maronis had guaranteed to this
old lady one of the best places in the skies, so that when he saw her
die happy, Henri gave her some egotistical tears; he began to weep on
his own account. Observing this grief, the abbe dried his pupil’s tears,
bidding him observe that the good woman took her snuff most offensively,
and was becoming so ugly and deaf and tedious that he ought to return
thanks for her death. The bishop had emancipated his pupil in 1811.
Then, when the mother of M. de Marsay remarried, the priest chose, in a
family council, one of those honest dullards, picked out by him through
the windows of his confessional, and charged him with the administration
of the fortune, the revenues of which he was willing to apply to the
needs of the community, but of which he wished to preserve the capital.
Towards the end of 1814, then, Henri de Marsay had no sentiment of
obligation in the world, and was as free as an unmated bird. Although he
had lived twenty-two years he appeared to be barely seventeen. As a rule
the most fastidious of his rivals considered him to be the prettiest
youth in Paris. From his father, Lord Dudley, he had derived a pair of
the most amorously deceiving blue eyes; from his mother the bushiest of
black hair, from both pure blood, the skin of a young girl, a gentle
and modest expression, a refined and aristocratic figure, and beautiful
hands. For a woman, to see him was to lose her head for him; do you
understand? to conceive one of those desires which eat the heart, which
are forgotten because of the impossibility of satisfying them, because
women in Paris are commonly without tenacity. Few of them say to
themselves, after the fashion of men, the “_Je Maintiendrai_,” of the
House of Orange.
Underneath this fresh young life, and in spite of the limpid springs in
his eyes, Henri had a lion’s courage, a monkey’s agility. He could cut a
ball in half at ten paces on the blade of a knife; he rode his horse
in a way that made you realize the fable of the Centaur; drove a
four-in-hand with grace; was as light as a cherub and quiet as a lamb,
but knew how to beat a townsman at the terrible game of _savate_ or
cudgels; moreover, he played the piano in a fashion which would have
enabled him to become an artist should he fall on calamity, and owned
a voice which would have been worth to Barbaja fifty thousand francs a
season. Alas, that all these fine qualities, these pretty faults, were
tarnished by one abominable vice: he believed neither in man nor woman,
God nor Devil. Capricious nature had commenced by endowing him, a priest
had completed the work.
To render this adventure comprehensible, it is necessary to add here
that Lord Dudley naturally found many women disposed to reproduce
samples of such a delicious pattern. His second masterpiece of this
kind was a young girl named Euphemie, born of a Spanish lady, reared in
Havana, and brought to Madrid with a young Creole woman of the Antilles,
and with all the ruinous tastes of the Colonies, but fortunately married
to an old and extremely rich Spanish noble, Don Hijos, Marquis de
San-Real, who, since the occupation of Spain by French troops, had taken
up his abode in Paris, and lived in the Rue St. Lazare. As much from
indifference as from any respect for the innocence of youth, Lord Dudley
was not in the habit of keeping his children informed of the relations
he created for them in all parts. That is a slightly inconvenient form
of civilization; it has so many advantages that we must overlook its
drawbacks in consideration of its benefits. Lord Dudley, to make no more
words of it, came to Paris in 1816 to take refuge from the pursuit of
English justice, which protects nothing Oriental except commerce. The
exiled lord, when he saw Henri, asked who that handsome young man might
be. Then, upon hearing the name, “Ah, it is my son.... What a pity!” he
said.
Such was the story of the young man who, about the middle of the month
of April, 1815, was walking indolently up the broad avenue of the
Tuileries, after the fashion of all those animals who, knowing their
strength, pass along in majesty and peace. Middle-class matrons turned
back naively to look at him again; other women, without turning round,
waited for him to pass again, and engraved him in their minds that they
might remember in due season that fragrant face, which would not have
disadorned the body of the fairest among themselves.
“What are you doing here on Sunday?” said the Marquis de Ronquerolles to
Henri, as he passed.
“There’s a fish in the net,” answered the young man.
This exchange of thoughts was accomplished by means of two significant
glances, without it appearing that either De Ronquerolles or De Marsay
had any knowledge of the other. The young man was taking note of the
passers-by with that promptitude of eye and ear which is peculiar to the
Parisian who seems, at first, to see and hear nothing, but who sees and
hears all.
At that moment a young man came up to him and took him familiarly by the
arm, saying to him: “How are you, my dear De Marsay?”
“Extremely well,” De Marsay answered, with that air of apparent
affection which amongst the young men of Paris proves nothing, either
for the present or the future.
In effect, the youth of Paris resemble the youth of no other town. They
may be divided into two classes: the young man who has something, and
the young man who has nothing; or the young man who thinks and he who
spends. But, be it well understood this applies only to those natives of
the soil who maintain in Paris the delicious course of the elegant life.
There exist, as well, plenty of other young men, but they are children
who are late in conceiving Parisian life, and who remain its dupes. They
do not speculate, they study; they _fag_, as the others say. Finally
there are to be found, besides, certain young people, rich or poor, who
embrace careers and follow them with a single heart; they are somewhat
like the Emile of Rousseau, of the flesh of citizens, and they never
appear in society. The diplomatic impolitely dub them fools. Be they
that or no, they augment the number of those mediocrities beneath the
yoke of which France is bowed down. They are always there, always ready
to bungle public or private concerns with the dull trowel of their
mediocrity, bragging of their impotence, which they count for
conduct and integrity. This sort of social _prizemen_ infests the
administration, the army, the magistracy, the chambers, the courts. They
diminish and level down the country and constitute, in some manner, in
the body politic, a lymph which infects it and renders it flabby. These
honest folk call men of talent immoral or rogues. If such rogues require
to be paid for their services, at least their services are there;
whereas the other sort do harm and are respected by the mob; but,
happily for France, elegant youth stigmatizes them ceaselessly under the
name of louts.